


White Snow

by BlackMajjicDuchess



Series: Namesake [19]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Abuse, Cold, Cold Weather, Death, Gen, Rebirth, Snow and Ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 13:02:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1551416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackMajjicDuchess/pseuds/BlackMajjicDuchess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I got the idea in my head one day to bring some of the Naruto characters face-to-face with the thing they were named after for the first time. I thought it might be fun. Also accepting challenges!</p><p>Stories will be posted separately but as part of the Namesake series.</p><p>Part 19: White Snow</p><p>Haku was born in a snowstorm. Twice. The snow is so very different in each life, yet still as beautiful as ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CountessMillarca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountessMillarca/gifts).



> To issue a challenge, just comment on one of the stories in the series with the name you'd like to see done. The only stipulation is that it HAS to be a name that has a meaning, and it has to be a meaning that is something one can encounter. Example: Madara means "spots." What the heck am I supposed to do with that? On the other hand, Naruto's name refers to some kind of fish cake, which is something he could confront somehow.
> 
> Haku challenge from CountessMillarca
> 
> Haku = White  
> Yuki = Snow

Haku would never be able to remember his first experience with the snow. Haku was born in a snowstorm. Twice.

He had been far too young to remember, bred into a world that was constantly white and chilly. The snow would always hold a place of significance for him, though. The first time he was born was his original birth, whelped to a mother and father that had loved him. In his first life, he had been happy, and the snow had been nothing more than a pretty toy, glitter dust that coated the world. Shiny, pristine...

Snow was beautiful. Winter, the endless winter of his homeland, had become his favorite season once he’d discovered the very nature of the thing. The sting of cold as each individual flake hit his face seemed to him to be a strange kind of magic. The first time he’d opened his palm to the heavens and seen that each one had its own identity, he was awestruck. For such a tiny thing, it was marvelously complex. He would spend his first lifetime trying to memorize all the designs he had ever seen, and he’d see hundreds. A moment after the first flake smacked his palm, it melted, gone forever, a fleeting masterpiece that somehow he had murdered. It saddened him to see it go, and for a long time afterward, he’d never touch another snowflake on purpose. Destroying anything broke his heart, but this thing in particular.

Snow was strong. When the flakes banded together into snowballs, snow sculptures, and high banks, there was almost nothing that could move it aside. It was heavy and resisted being touched, for the cold dissuaded prolonged contact. There were times, when he had been alone, right before his second birth, that he would burrow into the banks, and they’d become like houses. These were times when he almost felt warm. He found that interesting, that nature’s coldest miracle had saved him from freezing to death.

That was after his father had betrayed him. After he’d been labeled a monster, and targeted for murder. After he’d somehow, beyond all comprehension, manipulated the snow into a weapon and slaughtered them all.

But, before he’d been born for the second time.

* * *

 

The second time…

He was certain he was dying. He had struggled to hold onto a reason to stay alive, constantly moving through the winter winds, fighting dogs for tidbits of garbage that still maintained a scrap of nutrients to sustain his frail body. He had been born into the cold, ejected into the cold… he lived in the cold. He was sure, sometime in there, that he had died in the cold as well. His whole body had existed within the cold for so long that he no longer felt it. The chill seeped into his skin until he wore it like armor.

Haku _was_ the cold.

He blinked at the figure in the haze of white, thinking he was looking at a god, come to take him away from the cruelty of the world. If there was a god of winter, then surely this man was that god. His eyes were just as cold as the deadliest squall, his muscles as hard as ice. He glared down at Haku with the same contempt that the winter held for its people. Haku shivered, and it wasn’t just because of the cold. Those eyes… eyes that spoke of unspeakable, inhuman abuse. Eyes that were empty of life, desperate for a purpose. Eyes like his. For the first time, Haku felt something warm inside his heart. Life, unfurling, tentatively reigniting.

That was the second time he had been born in a snowstorm.

Charged with a new sense of purpose, Haku thrived. He followed the Winter God wherever the man went. Cold and death followed them in his wake. Haku was awe, wrapped in gratitude. Against all odds, the deadly demon of the mist known as Zabuza had rescued him from certain death. He had repurposed Haku into the weapon of winter itself, honed and tempered in a fire colder than ice. Murder. It wasn’t something that came to him naturally, but nothing about the snow and the cold had ever been easy. Learning to become as dangerous and terrible as a blizzard merely forced Haku to learn something new about the snow.

Snow was deadly. He’d learned quite by accident that he could make ice by melting, manipulating, and freezing the snow. When snow was tempered, as he had been tempered, into ice, it became a weapon. Cold could freeze a body. Snow could bury a body. Icicles were the world’s most perfect blade. Ice melted, and then no one would even have a clue what had happened to the victim. He’d seen Zabuza drown dozens of people with water. It struck Haku as odd that Zabuza had not also mastered the snow. It seemed to him that as cold as Zabuza was, the water should freeze, as Haku’s did. With that realization came the resolve that Haku would have to be Zabuza’s snowstorm. If Zabuza could not project the cold frost of his own heart upon his enemies, than Haku would fulfill that role.

And so, Haku learned.

Haku honed his abilities with ice, his favorite medium. It was delightfully cold, beautiful, and dangerous, all qualities that he shared with the ice. He learned to pierce the bodies of enemies with icicles and fatal precision. He learned to craft blades, senbon, and traps out of ice. And finally, he mastered his own technique, using mirrors to confuse and terrify his foes. Zabuza seemed quite pleased with this, and in turn, Haku was pleased as well.

The first time he had seen the snow, he had been too young to remember.

But the second time he had seen the snow, it heralded and swathed the God of Winter. The Demon of the Mist. Rogue Ninja. Friend. Teacher. Father. Savior.

Zabuza was the Winter. Terrifying, dangerous, cold in its concept. The idea of a murder. The danger of a season that never ended.

…

Haku was the Snow.

**Author's Note:**

> *sighs dramatically*
> 
> Oh. My. Goodness. I have been dealing with the worst case of writer's block evah. This challenge had me stuck for days. Then I had to stop working on another project... a project that is so awesome it outshines my other ideas (which killed THAT inspiration, too). I've suffered for lack of spark. Everything I write feels inadequate somehow. 
> 
> Hopefully, finally writing and publishing this little number will get me moving again.


End file.
